Chapter Fifteen The Gospel of Mares and Geldings #3
“Indeed!” Bingley waved his sporting gazette like a flag of victory.
“Hertfordshire was all very well for a season, of course. Pleasant enough assemblies, decent partridge shooting, but lacking in serious agricultural prospects. Barely a memory now! No, gentlemen. I have purchased an estate in Yorkshire!”
“Yorkshire,” Richard repeated slowly, exchanging a baffled look with Darcy.
“A breeding estate!” Bingley continued, his eyes shining dreamily. “You must come up in the autumn! Darcy, you will weep when you see the stables. I have acquired a foundation herd of the most magnificent creatures God ever put on this earth.”
He leaned in, his voice dropping to a tone of reverent, hushed awe. It was the exact tone he had used in the Meryton assembly rooms when he had first laid eyes on Jane Bennet.
“The bloodlines,” he whispered passionately. “You have never seen such symmetry. The hocks! The fetlocks! I purchased a mare last week—a dappled grey—and I swear to you, looking into her eyes is like looking into the soul of an angel.”
Darcy stared at his friend, at the man whose heart he had agonised over breaking, at the man who had driven Elizabeth Bennet to tears of righteous fury.
Charles Bingley was currently comparing the soulful eyes of a farm animal to a celestial being, and he meant every single word of it.
“A mare,” Robert enunciated the syllables. “How very... poetic, Bingley. And tell me, does this dappled grey angel occupy your every waking thought? Does she eclipse any prior... attachments?”
“Absolutely!” Bingley agreed, oblivious to the trap Robert was setting. “I can think of nothing but geldings and mares! I was just telling Lord Ponsonby—before you arrived—that a Yorkshire stallion is superior to anything bred in the South.”
“And the South holds no lingering regrets for you?” Richard leaned forward, deploying his interrogation voice. “No fond memories of the... the local society?”
“The society?” Bingley laughed. “Oh, it was a pleasant fancy, Colonel, a brief diversion. But a man must look to his legacy! And my legacy lies in Yorkshire. In fact!” Bingley clapped his hands together.
“You must all join me. I have secured a box at Astley’s Amphitheatre!
We shall watch the trick riding. It will be a triumph of equestrian skill! ”
“Astley’s,” Darcy repeated, his voice hollow, as though it belonged to someone else.
“Say you will come tonight!” Bingley beamed. “We can discuss breeding charts and oats!”
“We shall have to decline, Bingley.” Robert stood up and buttoned his coat. “We have pressing engagements this evening. Maybe some other day. I wish you and your... your fetlocks every happiness.”
“Shame! Well, another time! Darcy, I shall send you the pedigree of the grey!”
“Do that, Bingley,” Darcy whispered.
The three Fitzwilliam men turned and walked out of the room. They did not speak until they had retrieved their hats and stepped out onto the bustling pavement of St James’s Street.
The roar of London washed over them, but Darcy heard nothing. He stopped on the corner, leaning against the brick fa?ade of the club.
“Well.” Robert adjusted his beaver hat. “I believe that concludes the investigation. The patient is not only alive; he is entirely unaware that he was ever wounded.”
“A dappled grey.” Richard shook his head. “He replaced a beautiful woman with a horse in less than six months.”
Darcy closed his eyes.
I sundered a match the man forgot within a season, he thought, his stomach churning with a sickly mixture of relief and shame.
“It is guilt without the option of repair,” he whispered aloud, staring blindly at the cobblestones. “I cannot fix it. I cannot undo the pain I caused her sister, because Bingley does not even possess the depth to realise what he threw away.”
Robert placed a sympathetic hand on Darcy’s shoulder. “You cannot repair Bingley, Fitzwilliam. There is nothing to repair. He is whole, he is happy, and he is superficial.”
“But Miss Bennet suffered,” Darcy argued, looking up at his cousin, the memory of Elizabeth’s furious, tear-filled eyes in the parsonage burning in his mind. “Elizabeth suffered for her.”
“Miss Elizabeth,” Richard interjected, “is waiting for you in Cheapside. Tomorrow morning.”
Darcy looked at his cousins. They were right. The past was a landscape of mistakes and miscalculations, but the future was waiting in Gracechurch Street.
He stood up straighter, pushing away the brick wall. The guilt remained, a scar upon his conscience, but the path forward was crystal clear. He could not undo the past. He could not make Bingley into a man of depth.
But he could face the woman he loved.
He resolved, in that moment, to lay the final, unvarnished truth at Elizabeth’s feet.
He would go to Cheapside tomorrow, sit in the parlour of the uncle in trade and tell her about the Gospel of Mares and Geldings.
He would offer her the honesty of his own foolishness, and pray that she found it as ridiculous as he did.
“Come.” Darcy found his commanding resonance once again. “We have preparations to make for tomorrow. I believe I have a fish cart to locate.”
Robert grinned, the rakish spark returning to his eyes. “That’s the spirit, Cousin. I shall ensure Dawson packs your best gutting knife.”